Healthy pregnancies may have been terminated unnecessarily because of a procedural blunder by a teaching hospital.

The mistake came to light when a woman who was nine weeks pregnant was told that her baby had died in the womb and she would need a “uterine evacuation”. When she visited another hospital for the procedure, a new scan revealed that the foetus was alive and well. Emily Wheatley, 31, is now the mother of Ella, who is eight months old, but yesterday a report by the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales revealed how close she came to losing her.